You were born together, and together you shall be for evermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

After several days of keeping this idea in mind, finally I put together some time and materialized the ascii comic.
It's now published and available at et on Fire as : We are ascii

The basic idea was to make an et comic entirely out of ascii symbols and without using any real images. We are ascii is made using just that, together with some HTML mark up and a splash of css styling (for colouring the conversation text, for example).

So we have the little et and echo, made up of minimal ascii symbols, having their talks and arguments as usual.
The interesting thing is, you can select the contents of a panel just like you select text in a web page (in this post, I've used only screenshots of the same, and hence not selectable).
The comic was made in Mozilla Firefox ;)

All aspects of regular comics have been rendered in the ascii comic too. This includes the comic panel look and feel, and even the mouse-over text in the last panel (i.e, the text which appears when you place the mouse cursor over the last panel. This feature is probably overlooked by many readers).

Blogger's technical issues

Our friendly neighborhood Blogger post editor proved to be a frustrating tool for the making of ascii comic. The thing is that, Blogger incorporates many custom HTML processing and I could never align the comic contents as I wished.
So a separate document is made, and it is loaded from within the blog.

Create and Contribute

The ascii comic can be improved in a number of ways - from more colors to additional background shapes, and more awesome css styling. The HTML code behind the comic is open and free. Try your hand at making contributions to the ascii comic!
When yet another ascii comic is made, it could contain an ascii tree or a cloud made by you :)